Many Indians have aspired to live the American dream in the yesteryears and have travelled to the USA, aiming to start a better life. Indian Americans now constitute a population of nearly 4.4 m (44 lakh). This phenomenon, however, has taken a haywire turn, as the horde to settle in the states has come down to a magnanimous number of Indians trespassing US borders.

Few short of a lakh Indians caught trespassing

A staggering number of 96,917 Indians were nabbed in one year from the US borders, attempting to enter the country illegally. These numbers, from Oct 2022 to Sept 2023, were released by the American Customs and Border Protection Agency.

Among the countries with the highest number of people entering illegally into the USA, India is ranked third.

Indian trespassers in numbers

Out of the Indians caught, 41,000 tried entering from the Mexico-US border, while more than 30,000 tried entering from the Canada-US border.

The agency releasing this data has divided the trespassers into four categories: children, families, individuals, and micro-groups of families. Out of them, the most were individual trespassers.

The number of Indians trespassing illegally into the US has shot up to nearly five times in three years.

In 2019–20, 19,883 Indians were nabbed from the borders, while in 2021–22, the number rose to 61,927.

America’s purview over this

Republican leader James Lankford commented on these numbers: “Indians don’t feel safe in India and are trespassing into the US as there’s widespread unemployment in their country. Last year, 45,000 Indians also entered the USA.”

Several reports in the US media point to the reason for this as increasing religious disharmony and decreasing employment opportunities in the country.

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